Saving Room for Dessert

by K. C. Constantine

“I’m just telling’ you what she can do, that’s all. Nobody can predict what anybody else is gonna do because of what she does. Tell her go to the courthouse, go to the DA’s Office, tell ’em what’s goin’ on, they’ll give her a PFA, they’ll give him one, they’ll file copies with the local cops—”

  “Give her a what?”

  “—protection from abuse order. And they have to file copies with the local PD, wherever she lives, and also with the state cops. Long as there’s a copy of that PFA, that order, if they got a copy in their offices, whatever the PD, they gotta respond if she calls.”

  “Well isn’t like there anything else she can do?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like get some kinda spray thing, tear gas, or whatever.”

  “You mean pepper spray?”

  “Yeah, or Mace or whatever you guys carry—don’t you carry Mace? Tear gas?”

  “Nah. Pepper spray. OC. That Mace, there was a lotta problems with the wind.”

  “Oh. Or like, Jimmy was sayin’, like maybe some kinda stunner gun.”

  “Stunner gun?”

  “Isn’t that what you call it? Or did Jimmy make that up?”

  “No no, there’s a thing called a stun gun. You touch somebody with it, it sorta paralyzes ’em. But you don’t wanna mess with that.”

  “Why?”

  “Coupla reasons. Like, for instance, your friend, uh, she any bigger than you? Or stronger? No offense, but does she lift weights, work out, run, study martial arts or somethin’ like that, you know?”

  “Uh, not much, no—I mean she tries. She just don’t have a lotta time for that, you know, with her job. And her kid and everything.”

  “Uh-ha. Well, first, those stun things, they cost a lotta money. Second, say she gets one, and this guy decides to get handsy one night. He takes her by surprise, overpowers her, which ain’t outta the realm of possibility, right?”

  “Oh right, yeah.”

  “So whatever she’s carryin’, he takes it, he uses it on her. So the thing she thought was gonna protect her now winds up hurtin’ her, you follow? Course that’s true with any kinda weapon, you gotta know how to use it, and you gotta have your mind right to use it. Easy to shoot at paper targets, lotsa people do that. They get a gun, they get a permit to carry, they go waste a lotta ammo on paper, comes time to shoot somebody ’cause they’re in danger, hey, suddenly it’s a whole different story. Their body’s in full fight or flight, their pulse is up to about a hundred and eighty a minute, two hundred maybe, not exactly the ideal conditions to be makin’ those kinda decisions, whether you should shoot somebody, you know? Best thing for her to do is turn it over to the people in the DA’s Office, let the pros handle it.”

  “Yeah, well sometimes those pros don’t handle it so good.”

  “Yeah, granted, sometimes mistakes get made, I’m not gonna argue that. But see, the mistakes, everybody hears about those. The things that go right, you don’t hear about them so much, those things, they don’t get in the papers. Believe me, in cases like this, things go right a lot more than they go wrong, I’m tellin’ you. Tell your friend go to the DA.”

  “You really think that’s the best thing?”

  “Yeah, I really do. I’m no expert, understand? I mean you listen to Jimmy, all I am is all muscle and no brains, but I’ve dealt with a lotta these things. Your friend’s way better off lettin’ the DA and the cops handle it than tryin’ it herself. Unless, uh, your friend would maybe like me to make a personal appearance with this guy, you know? Whattaya think? Think she might prefer that instead?”

  “Oh I don’t know, you know? I don’t know if, uh, if she’d think that was such a good idea.”

  “Well, that’s all the advice I got, Lois. Except for one other thing. Your friend, she gets one of these pepper sprays?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make sure she buys a new one, what she doesn’t wanna do is borrow one’s been layin’ around in somebody’s drawer five or six years. Especially if she also gets a stun gun.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause those old sprays, they used to have alcohol in ’em, along with the OC.”

  “What’s that stand for, OC?”

  “Ah, that stands for oleoresin capsicum, that’s the stuff that burns ya, the stuff they extract from the hot peppers. But that ain’t my point. Those old sprays, the ones with alcohol in ’em? You spray somebody with one of those, and then you hit him with the stun gun? They catch fire. Just go poof, their face just practically explodes, that’s why nobody makes ’em with alcohol anymore. So what I’m sayin’ is don’t let your friend, you know? Don’t let her wind up with some old spray, especially if she’s listenin’ to Jimmy talk her into buyin’ a stun gun, you understand me?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Somethin’ else too. They’re illegal, you hear? Both those things. In this state they’re prohibited offensive weapons. They’re not listed in the statute exactly, they sorta come under the catchall phrase in that part of the statute, you know what I’m sayin’? I mean nobody comes down too hard on a woman for carryin’ a spray—if that’s all she does. Nobody’s gonna do a stop-and-search on her, but she sprays some guy ’cause he gets handsy? And then she zaps him? That could get sticky in the DA’s Office.”

  “Woo. This is a lot more complicated than I thought.”

  “Yeah. It usually is. Listen, talk to your friend, tell her what I said about maybe me just goin’ to see the guy, give him some information. Some people, they’re just ignorant, you know? They find out what’s what, sometime the problem just goes away. Never know.”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell her that. Probably. I mean I should.”

  “Yeah, and then lemme know what she says. Okay? We done here?”

  “Yeah. I think.”

  “Well thanks for bringin’ my vest out, Lois. Appreciate it.”

  “Oh don’t mention it. Thank you. I mean it.”

  “Sorry I hurt your feelings. Didn’t mean to, you know?”

  “Oh that’s alright. I know you didn’t. You’re just …”

  “I’m just what?”

  “You’re just … you’re just you, that’s all.”

  “Whatever. Listen, like I said, some guys, you know, they get the right information from the right person, that’s all they need. Don’t need to go through the whole paperwork thing. Not everybody’s nuts. Or deaf. There are some guys, you can talk to ’em.”

  “Is that what you’d do? Talk?”

  “Hey, I know how to talk.”

  “The way you, uh, way you talked to Jimmy? Little while ago?”

  “Well, see, Jimmy’s a special case. He’s always overestimatin’ his brainpower. Been doin’ that since we were kids. Hey, I gotta go, Lois. Your friend wantsa talk to me, you know my number, right?”

  “Nine-one-one?”

  “No, Lois, that’s only for emergencies. Didn’t I ever give you my card?”

  “No. You cops have a card? You mean like a business card?”

  “Yeah, Lois, a business card. We’re in the information business, the cops. People call us all the time.”

  “You’re puttin’ me on, right?”

  “Whatever, Lois. See ya tomorrow probably.”

  Canoza gave her one of his cards, then left her, arms folded across her chest as though she was suddenly chilled. In his side mirror, he could see her starting to run back into Jimmy’s. He shook his head. She ran just like a girl. He hoped she didn’t do anything stupid like listen to Jimmy about that stun gun. Skinny as she was, she wouldn’t last ten seconds with any guy put his hands on her. Why’d all the good-looking ones wind up working for assholes like Jimmy? That was something else God was going to have to answer for.…

  RESETA GOT back in his MU with the same disgusted feeling he always had after he’d delivered a juvenile to the detention center. No matter how many times he’d done it, there was always something sour about locking up a kid. Whether they gave him a lot of trouble or none—and thi
s Maguire, or whoever he was, had been no worse than many of the rest and not nearly as bad as some—Reseta couldn’t get over his own psychological hump about how young the kid was. Probably still fascinated by his reflection in mirrors, of fuzz on his upper lip, of hair sprouting in his armpits and in the middle of his chest or below his navel. Probably just beginning to puzzle out how to look like he was with a girl so he could brag to the boys.

  Reseta knew what his disgust was about. He’d discussed his own childhood many times with a shrink. His “counseling” had lasted for a year, starting a week after his probationary period when he’d turned what should have been a straightforward arrest into an inexcusable assault and then-chief Mario Balzic had “strongly suggested” to Reseta that counseling was not negotiable: if he wanted to keep his shield, he’d not only make the weekly appointments but at least once a month would submit a written summary of his sessions. Balzic told Reseta, “Everybody’s got axes to grind from when they were kids. Last thing I need in this department is somebody doesn’t even know he’s carryin’ an ax.”

  It had started when Reseta was cruising the alleys in the Flats at the end of the first week he was in an MU without a training partner. He happened on a father beating his son with a piece of garden hose, and he came out of the MU with his baton like a lance and rammed it into the father’s back without a word, not so much as a “Stop!” “Freeze!” “Police!”—nothing, according to the kid who was taking the beating, who was the worst witness against him when the lawyers were taking depositions for the civil suit.

  The father wound up in Conemaugh General with a ruptured kidney; the city solicitor, upon council’s unanimous recommendation, settled the suit with sealed results; the city wound up with a higher deductible in its liability insurance, and Reseta served the next six months on administrative probation, and the next twelve in counseling with Abe Stein, the psychologist of Balzic’s choice.

  Fortunately for Reseta, and despite all of his prejudices and all the ragging he took from the rest of the members of the department, he’d hit it off with Stein from the beginning. Plus, he was powerfully motivated to see the counseling through to the end for two reasons: one, of course, was that it had been “strongly suggested” to him by Balzic, and two because Reseta had wanted nothing else in life but to be first a soldier and then a cop. At eighteen he’d enlisted in the army and served his year in Vietnam from October 15, 1967, to October 15, 1968, with the mechanized infantry in the 25th Division. He was wounded four times, twice in one firefight. A piece of mortar shrapnel still floated in the soft tissue of his right buttocks. He kept telling himself he was going to have it removed, but after the pain of its occasional stab went away, he’d forget about it until the next time.

  What had most interested Abe Stein was what he called Reseta’s “psychological algebra” that equated the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army regulars with the Guinnan brothers. Stein was fascinated by that almost more than by Reseta’s accounts of the continual harassment he’d endured from the Guinnans from first grade through his senior year in high school.

  “And you understood this transference, this projection onto the Vietnamese? There was no doubt you knew what you were doing?”

  “Oh no, uh-uh. I knew exactly what 1 was doin’. Absolutely.”

  “So you never saw yourself there as a patriot, a man serving his country in a time of war?”

  “Patriot? Nah. That word never crossed my mind.”

  “You simply—if such a thing is possible to be simple—you wanted to be a soldier, is that it?”

  “Yeah. Probably would’ve been one if I’d been born in Hanoi.”

  “Interesting. So, despite your existential participation, you were, uh, totally unconcerned with the politics of this war.”

  “I didn’t know what the politics was. And wouldn’t’ve cared if I did. I never heard one guy, my whole year there, never heard any enlisted man, any grunt, say one word about politics—except, and there was always this one exception—every time we got an FNG, there would always be—”

  “A what? An F-what?”

  “FNG. Fucking new guy,”

  “Oh. Go on.”

  “Uh, well, yeah, I mean, every time one of them came into the platoon, some guys, not me, ’cause I didn’t care, but some guys would always pump him, you know, ask him what was goin’ on back here. So you would hear about these protests and the marches and all that stuff, but I never paid any attention to it. I mean I’d listen to it, you know, but it didn’t make any difference to me.”

  “And why was that, do you think?”

  “Didn’t apply to me. I wasn’t goin’ anywhere else. I was there. Didn’t make any difference to me what was happenin’ back here.”

  “But surely in your training, you must have received some indoctrination, some motivational training, for lack of a better phrase, about why you were going there, and what you were going to do when you got there, no?”

  “Look, highest rank I made was sergeant, E5—and that was only the last month I was there. I’d been actin’ squad leader for like two months, and they finally gave me the stripes and the raise. But all I ever heard from our platoon leader, either from a lieutenant when we had one, or from the platoon sergeant, was, uh, this is where we’re goin’, this is what we’re gonna do when we get there, either set up a base camp, or go on ambush patrol, or be the anvil for the hammer—”

  “The what?”

  “Search and destroy. You were either the anvil, you set up an ambush, and another unit did the sweep, they were the hammer, or vice versa, and the idea was the one unit was supposed to push the VC or the NVA your way and you were supposed to take ’em out. Most of the time it didn’t work, I guess ’ cause we were in the APCs, we sorta figured they always heard us comin’, I don’t know—”

  “The AP-what?”

  “APCs. Armored personnel carriers. That’s what mechanized infantry was. Is. They had tracks like a tank, they could hold a squad, you know, thirteen guys—but we never had a full squad the whole time I was there. And it doesn’t have a cannon like tanks. Biggest weapon was a .50-caliber machine gun. In a turret on top. But one RPG could take you outta action real fast. Hit the turret, it’d blow it right off—”

  “RPG?”

  “Yeah. Rocket-propelled grenade. Some of those slopes were pretty good with those things, man. Put a lotta tracks outta action. Lotta guys too. Between them and the mortars, sometimes it was NFF.”

  “No fucking fun?”

  “You got it. None whatsoever.”

  “But, uh, you don’t seem to have ever been really all that distressed by this.”

  “I wasn’t. I liked bein’ a soldier. I think maybe—no maybes about it, I’m sure—if I hadn’t wanted to be a cop, I would’ve stayed in. Been a thirty-year man.”

  “So are you sayin’ you were never afraid?”

  “No, that’s not what I’m sayin’. Nah, there were times, I mean I was afraid real bad a coupla times. Once we caught hell for—I don’t know how long ’cause I was unconscious for most of it—but I heard like six, seven hours. They musta had two battalions. They weren’t supposed to be anywhere near us, I mean, we were lookin’ for ’em, but this lieutenant we had at that time, he told us they were like maybe six clicks northwest of where we were. Six kilometers. And we were goin’ down this road through this, uh, rubber plantation. I guess at one time it was French. So there are these rubber trees on both sides of the road, meanwhile, dead ahead of us, I could see this tree line, you know, dense, about maybe two hundred meters in front of the lead APC, just jungle, you know? Like a green wall. I was in the turret in the fourth one back, I could see that whole tree line, man, it just, I don’t know how to describe it, it just went from trees to smoke, like that! One after another, so close together they sounded like some giant wooshy machine gun, all these RPGs were comin’ at us, man, one went by my head, missed me by less than a foot. And the first three APCs, I mean, I couldn’t even blink it happened so fas
t, tracks were flyin’, turrets were flyin’, guys were flyin’, somebody’s hand hit me in the chin, like a thumb and three fingers, and I just bailed, just dove outta that turret, and I’m on the ground, runnin’ back, all I got’s a .45, I managed to get behind I think it was the sixth track in line, sixth, seventh, I don’t know, but I knew we stayed there, we were all dead. It was just flat. Open. No dikes, no ditches, no canals, nothin’ to get down into.

  “There were twelve APCs in all. First three were done in the first five seconds. But at the end of the column, this FNG was drivin’ the last one. I didn’t know him except his nickname was Hog, ’cause he would eat all the C rations nobody else would touch. And he couldn’t see anything but the APC right in front of him, so he didn’t know what was goin’ on, and the asshole wouldn’t believe us, the guys that were runnin’ back, all the guys that could move, they bailed just like me, and here comes the lieutenant walkin’ back like he’s on the beach lookin’ for seashells, just amblin’, you know? And his right arm is gone, blood’s spurtin’ out like a hose, man, and obviously he’s in shock, and guys’re screamin’ at him to get down, and he makes it all the way back to where I am and just keels over, you know, face-first. So I knew he was dead. Which was lucky for me ’cause he was still carryin’ his M-16 in his good hand. So then I had somethin’ to shoot with.

  “But those slopes, man, they had us out there in the open—and I’ll never understand this—if they would’ve just spread out along that tree line? They would’ve got us all. They would’ve got us all in the first five minutes—if it had taken that long. Man, the only cover we had was the first three, the ones they blew the tracks off of. If they’d’ve spread out, they could’ve got the rest easy, ’cause when we stopped we closed up, we were way too close together, we were only like ten, twelve meters apart.

  “And the worst part was we couldn’t convince this Hog asshole to turn his track around and get outta there. He kept sayin’, where’s the lieutenant, where’s the lieutenant? I ain’t movin’ till the lieutenant tells me, and I’m tryin’ to tell the jagoff the lieutenant’s dead, and the captain, the company CO, I figured he had to be dead too, ’cause he was in the second track, so I’m screamin’ at him, you know, turn this thing around and get outta here, you’re blockin’ everybody, nobody can move, and the idiot just sits there. So I did get scared when I shot him. A little bit. Afterwards.”